New York Plastic Surgeon Performs 'Most Extensive' Face Transplant Ever

Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, a plastic surgeon at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, claimed to have performed the most extensive facial transplant ever in August this year. The plastic surgeon gave Patrick Hardison, a 41-year-old former firefighter from Tennessee, the face of 26-year-old David Rodebaugh. The surgical procedure took more than 26 hours to be completed. David Rodebaugh, a 26-year-old bike mechanic from Brooklyn, was pronounced brain dead after a cycling accident in summer this year.

Hardison suffered extreme burns on face and other parts of body while responding to a house fire in Senatobia, Mississippi on September 5, 2001. Surgeons tried to restore his face by transplanting flesh from his thighs, but over the years, he had to undergo a whopping 71 operations and became dependent on painkillers, which wrecked his family life.

He once said children ran screaming and crying when they first saw him after he got burnt. Luckily, the latest successful procedure gave him an entirely new face. 

Patrick Hardison, after his facial transplant at Langone Medical Center in New York.

Explaining the latest procedure, a report stated, “Rodriguez started on Rodebaugh, carefully dissecting the half-inch-thick scalp away from the skull. He worked from the back toward the ears, then the nose, which he sawed off. The trick was to cut away the tissue while preserving nerves, muscles…”

The surgical procedure and the stories of Hardison and Rodebaugh’s lives were detailed in a report published in New York Magazine Sunday night.